Scholarly Impact

What

Article metrics have traditionally been defined by the number of citations an article receives. In recent years, however, scholarly communities have advocated for additional metrics to be considered, alongside citation counts, when measuring the impact of an individual article or publication. 

Applications

• Citations
  • The number of citations received by a publication on other publications.
  • Several services provide citation counts of scholarly articles, book chapters, and (at a limited level) books.
    • Scopus
    • Web of Science
    • OpenAlex
    • Google Scholar
    • Dimensions
• Field weighted citation impact (FCWI)
  • The Field-Weighted Citation Impact (FWCI) is an article metric which compares the total citations received by a publication compared to the average number of citations received by all other similar publications from the same research field in the 3 years following publication. The global mean of the FWCI is 1.0, so an FWCI of 1.50 means 50% more cited than the world average; whereas, an FWCI of .75 means 25% less cited than the world average. 
  • Provided by Scopus
• Article ranking - Paper in top percentile cited (1%, 5%, 10% and 25%)
  • Paper that is in the top 1%, 5%, 10% or 25% of most cited for a given subject category, year and publication type.
  • Provided by
    • Scopus
    • SciVal
    • Essential Science Indicators
• Highly cited paper
  • Paper published in the last 10 years with the most citations (top 1%) when compared with papers in the same field and publication year.
  • Provided by 
    • Web of Science
    • Essential Science Indicators

Considerations

Researchers are encouraged to use traditional data points such as citation counts, along with other types of data points such as altmetrics (usage, mentions, downloads, likes) to quantify both the "scholarly visibility" and "social visibility" of an article.